One time I got an email from a “SEO expert” telling me that my site was doing so poorly in search engines because one of my pages had a few validation errors and that I needed to hire an “expert” like him to “optimize” my site so it would rank better. Here are the facts:
- The site ranked in the top 10 for phrases like “free wordpress themes” and “wordpress themes” which are pretty sought after keywords in that niche.
- The site averaged about 30,000 total visits per month from search engines (mostly Google) for other various long tail keywords.
- The site had about 400,000 incoming links from various websites, quality content, and a good reputation within its niche.
- The XHTML validation errors were because of a YouTube video I embedded. The default code YouTube provided caused a few errors in validation.
Anyone with half a brain when it comes to SEO will know that a strong link profile, quality content, and a solid reputation will trump a few validation errors on a page (with the exception of a few edge cases).
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.CO is the country code for Colombia, and registration was just opened up to the general public yesterday. Yes, there have already been some big sales like e.co for $81,000, Twitter acquiring t.co, and Overstock buying o.co for $350,000.
Who Is Buying Them
As far as the biggest sales go, it appears large corporations are grabbing them up for vanity purposes. T.co, for example, will be used by Twitter for some sort of link shortening service.
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I follow a lot of people in the WordPress community from my @themelab account, a number of whom run their own businesses based around WordPress. If you run a business on Twitter, there’s a good chance your clients and other (potential) customers follow you.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Twitter postings from people which essentially mock their customers. Here’s some of the common ones I see from the commercial themer crowd:
- Wow, this clueless customer of mine just posted a total newbie question on my support forum. Check it out! (screenshot link here)
- Haha, someone who used a pirated version of my theme just got hacked and now their entire blog is ruined. Too bad for them.
- This site just switched away from my awesome SEO-optimized theme and now it looks like total crap, say bye-bye to search rankings.
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Some of you asked how I set up my todo list after I posted a screenshot of it a few days ago. I set it up from a freely available script I found on TutorialZine.com, from a tutorial called AJAX-ed Todo List With PHP, MySQL & jQuery.
In the following screencast tutorial, I’ll show you how to set it up on a cPanel host (I used HostGator):
- Set up a subdomain for your todo list page (optional, necessary in some cases)
- Password protect the directory your todo list is in (optional, highly recommended)
- Download the script from TutorialZine, extract the files, and upload them via FTP
- Set up a database, create a user, and add the user to the database
- Get the database connection details and put it in the connection file
- Import the database structure through PHPmyAdmin
Screencast is after the jump.
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This whole “I follow you, you follow me” mentality on Twitter has bothered me for a while. Basically, it goes like this: if someone follows you on Twitter, it’s “rude” not to follow them back. This is nonsense. Why? Here are a few reasons:
- Interest Factor – You should follow someone on Twitter because you’re interested in what they have to say. People should follow you on Twitter because they’re interested in what you have to say. Period.
- Spam Factor – A lot of your new followers are probably spammers just waiting for you to take the bait and follow them back. Then they’ll fill up your DM box with teeth whitening offers and phishing links.
- Fake Ego Boost – If one of your followers is also following 50,000 other people, chances are they aren’t paying attention to anything you say. They might use a program like TweetDeck to filter a small list of tweets they actually do want to see. Who cares if someone follows you if they don’t even read what you have to say?
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